By Gaston Tanoira, Technology Leader, Avaya Latin America
After almost two years of dealing with the effects of the pandemic and the great technological acceleration of many sectors of the industry, it is clear that companies are now faced with the need to make their IT investments sustainable over time, and seek new alternatives that allow the design and creation of solutions tailored to your needs, in an increasingly cost-effective way.
In addition, the changes in work dynamics, the new cybersecurity risks and the growing interest in increasingly linking technological development with environmental sustainability mean that 2022 will be full of great challenges for organizations. This is why Avaya presents some aspects that will become a trend for this year.
AI will continue to revolutionize the total experience
According to a study carried out by Avaya, 49% of Chileans prefer to contact the customer service area of large organizations such as banks, airlines, public services and online retailers through web chat. However, 58% consider that telephone support has increased in importance in recent months. This is why being able to anticipate the needs of users in different communication channels is allowing industries, such as Contact Centers, to make effective decisions to build stronger relationships with their users, through Artificial Intelligence.
Services such as sentiment-based call routing allow interactions to be classified according to the needs of each user and connect them with agents who have the ideal skills to serve them. The monitoring of interactions with customers also allows generating recommendations to optimize service in real time. In aspects such as cybersecurity, AI is helping to shield customer communications and prevent crimes such as identity theft thanks to voice biometrics and the analysis of writing patterns.
The use of Artificial Intelligence is making it possible to build more efficient and secure customer experiences, while promoting the humanization and assertiveness of service agents and encouraging them to develop their soft skills. And it is expected that this link will continue to strengthen in the coming months.
Redefinition of labor paradigms
After nearly two years of disruption, employees have learned to work differently and are rethinking not just how, when and where they work, but why they work. 71% of workers, according to an Avaya study, say that the best alternative for them is to establish hybrid work dynamics, because they want to maintain the advantages of a remote modality, but in many cases they miss the face-to-face relationship with your clients and work teams.
And this rethinking of the paradigms of flexible work is just beginning. A McKinsey study shows that 40% of employees are planning to change jobs in the next 3-6 months, and this major shakeup is creating fundamental changes in the global job market.
In this redefinition of labor paradigms, it will be key to define a work hub for collaborators, so the use of platforms such as Avaya Spaces will continue to be essential to consolidate synergies in hybrid and remote teams. These spaces are not only communication channels, but work centers that facilitate all the activities that the collaborators must carry out. In addition, it will be very important that these solutions have flexible and modular designs with APIs that allow them to customize their services and functions according to the needs and workflows of each organization.
Citizen developers and flexible and composable solutions
There is a huge IT talent deficit and a great need for technological transformation in businesses of all sizes and sectors. This has generated the emergence of a new protagonist: the developer citizen. A character that, thanks to the new low-code tools -which do not require mastery of programming languages-, or to solutions with flexible and modular designs, can create applications and platforms that transform and automate the operations of their organization and that use the power of the data to “reason” about it and make informed business decisions.
Citizen developers are helping to reduce bottlenecks, close development gaps, increase agility and innovate faster, and have become a key part of the digital transformation of their organizations.
Initiatives such as Avaya Experience Builders align perfectly with this trend, as they are creating communities and modular, flexible and composable tools that allow the co-development of tailored experiences, taking advantage of existing service offerings and the creation of completely new ones. through technologies such as artificial intelligence and cloud services. These types of dynamics will drive combinatorial innovation – in which existing elements are combined to create a new development – and the collective intelligence of organizations to create new technological solutions that increasingly respond to particular business needs. Therefore, the digital transformation will be less and less a matter for engineers and more areas of the organizations will be able to play a relevant role in technological development.
Cybersecurity central axis of innovation
According to a Kaspersky report, in the first 8 months of 2021, cyberattacks increased by 24% in Latin America, and the home office (remote access) and hacking were identified as the main vectors for these attacks. As the advancement in technology adoption accelerates, the need to raise the security standards of this type of innovation also increases. This implies not only technological developments but also the generation of a clearer awareness in relation to cybersecurity risks, by all the collaborators and business partners of the organizations.
According to studies such as the Digital Defense Report, digital hygiene measures such as verifying the veracity of information from suspicious emails, creating secure passwords or keeping the versions of the operating system and mobile applications up to date, can protect organizations from 98% of The attacks. Therefore, raising awareness of this type of situation will be key in the coming months.
'Sustainable' technology
Another big trend that is emerging is the need to put technology at the service of sustainability. Countries and organizations will require significant computing capacity to index, collect, store and process information related to their biodiversity and monitoring the impact of their productive activities. The role of technology will be essential to guide their path towards carbon neutrality, and also to fight against phenomena such as deforestation, coastal erosion, for the conservation of ecosystems and biodiversity. The potential of technology to promote cleaner production methods, circular economies and more sustainable development models is going to be the main protagonist in the coming years.